Monthly Archives: January 2013

The service and reporting features offered by the top tablet newsstand providers.

Not every publisher has the resources to cover all the bases and provide tablet editions for all the digital newsstands out there. Plus, Next Issue Media, for now, still remains relatively exclusive in the brands it selects for its platform. Here, we present a handy table that compares feature, service and reporting sets for the top newsstands: Apple, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Next Issue, Zinio and Google.

For example, much hay has been made over data sharing and reporting—particularly with Apple. But the chart shows that the various newsstand have very different standards for what’s shared and what’s not.

Like this:

As magazines make the transition from print to pixels, some publishers are using the move as an opportunity to jack up their prices for second-rate products.

As magazines make the transition from print to pixels, some publishers are using the move as an opportunity to jack up their prices – in some cases, to more than they were charging for print editions. And that’s for tablet versions that are too often crappy afterthoughts.

To be fair, magazines are contending with legitimate financial concerns. Their advertising revenue has been declining and the historically discounted subscription rates they’ve charged for print delivery just aren’t enough to pay the freight. To cope, many publishers are asking readers to chip in more – on digital versions as well as print editions.

Like this:

Lionel Barber to cut 35 jobs in ‘big cultural shift’ for business daily. By Josh Halliday

The Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, has announced plans to move the title to a digital-first strategy in a move he described as a “big cultural shift” for the business daily, and cut 35 jobs.

Barber said the FT will make a net headcount reduction of 25 – after hiring 10 journalists for digital roles – in an effort to save £1.6m this year as part of the strategy, outlined to staff in a memo on Monday, seen by MediaGuardian. He added that the FT needed to be “reshaped for the digital age”.

Barber said: “We need to ensure that we are serving a digital platform first, and a newspaper second. This is a big cultural shift for the FT that is only likely to be achieved with further structural change.”

According to the comScore Video Metrix, 182 million U.S. Internet users watched 38.7 billion online content videos in December, while video ad views totaled 11.3 billion. The 11.3 billion video ad views in December is twice as many as in January 2012, and represents 59% year-over-year growth.

Magazine publisher Hearst has partnered with Apple to release digital editions of its magazines before the print books drop.

Hearst is the first publisher to participate in, “Read Them Here First,” a new program from Apple’s Newsstand which gives iPad users access to publications before these titles are available elsewhere. As of now 20 Hearst titles are available through Apple’s Newsstand’s new offering including: O The Oprah Magazine, Esquire and Good Housekeeping.

It’s not just Americans who aren’t working. It’s America itself, a country whose economy once worked for almost everyone, not just the rich.

In the old America, if you worked hard, you had a good chance of moving up.

In the old America, the fruits of people’s labors accrued to the whole country, not just the top.

In the old America, there was a strong middle class, and their immense collective purchasing power drove the economy for decades.

No longer.

Over the past couple of decades, the disparity between “the 1%” and everyone else has hit a level not seen since the 1920s. And there is a widespread and growing sense that life here is not fair or right.

If America cannot figure out a way to fix these problems, the country will likely become increasingly polarized and de-stabilized. And if that happens, the recent “Occupy” protests will likely be only the beginning.

The problem in a nutshell is this:

In the never-ending tug-of-war between “labor” and “capital,” there has rarely—if ever—been a time when “capital” was so clearly winning.

The litany of bad news for newspapers is continuing in 2013, with more layoffs and reductions in frequency.

The Star Ledger of Newark, New Jersey’s largest daily newspaper, announced that it is laying off 34 employees, including 19 full-time employees and 15 part-time employees, according to the newspaper. The total will include 18 staffers from the newspaper’s editorial operations, or around 9% of the 195-person newsroom.

Explaining the cuts, Publisher Richard Vezza cited the long-term decline in print advertising, as well as the economic effects of Hurricane Sandy, which devastated New Jersey households and businesses. Advance is also laying off 12 employees at The Express-Times of Easton, PA,11 employees at the South Jersey Times, and three employees from its weekly newspapers in western New Jersey.

Share this:

Like this:

The population of people reading newspapers has aged dramatically in the last three years to the point that nearly three-quarters of the audience is aged 45 or older, according to my analysis of survey and census data.

When I performed the same analysis using the same methodology in 2010, only half of the newspaper audience was aged 45 or higher, reflecting a rapidly growing rejection of newspapers among most younger readers.See on newsosaur.blogspot.com

Facebook on Tuesday unveiled a revamped internal search system that makes it easier for users to get information among the vast array of status updates, pictures, “Likes” and other content posted to the social network.

Launched at a widely anticipated press event at Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif. headquarters, the new service called Graph Search was presented by CEO Mark Zuckerberg as an alternative to the type of Web-based search tied to keywords and popularized by Google and other search engines.

Instead, it is geared to answer specific questions and phrases in regular English related to a user’s social graph, such as “my friends in New York who like Jay-Z,” or “people from my hometown who like hiking.” The results are ranked based on people someone is closest with on Facebook based on their level of interaction.

The beta version of Graph Search focuses on four main areas: people, photos, places and interests. That means people can look up things such as “photos I like, ”restaurants in San Francisco,” or even “movies liked by people who are film directors.” Zuckerberg gave the example of searching for “local friends who like ‘Game of Thrones.’”

Like this:

SW is essentially a framework to link metadata (data about data) of data stored in disparate databases on the Web so that it will allow machines to query these databases and yield enriched results. SW is an extension of the existing World Wide Web. It provides a standardized way of expressing the relationships between web pages, to allow machines to understand the meaning of hyperlinked information. With SW enabling linking of various databases, it would be possible for machines to find information and relations that would not be available from any single database. Instead of data being in web silos, we will have a layer where the data is stored, a layer which maps and abstracts and a layer for Web Data applications. Work on SW is done in W3C and “is a collaborative effort led by W3C with participation from a large number of researchers and industrial partners.” The activity is carried out in several W3C groups”.